


Genesis

by Marie_L



Category: Annihilation (2018 Garland)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Scientists, Body Modification, F/F, Language, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-16 13:42:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14812445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marie_L/pseuds/Marie_L
Summary: After a mysterious, hushed-up incident closes off part of the St. Mark's National Wildlife Refuge, ornithologist Anya Thorensen takes it upon herself to investigate the strange mutated beings emerging from the quarantine zone. But it's even stranger once she's allowed in.





	Genesis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lake (beyond_belief)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beyond_belief/gifts).



“Dr. Anya Thorensen had her crotchety moments, but her dedication to the fauna of the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge was indisputable. Anya often preferred a sticky swamp devoid of civilization to her fellow humans, anyway. People: who needed them? Sure, she barked orders at volunteers and underlings and put in her time at bureaucratic meetings like a good little federal cog, but it was out in the wild that her passions resided. She could have been a university professor with an army of grad students, but instead preferred to get muddy in the field, alone, just her and the birds and the crocs and a lot of sweat. So the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service it was. Money: who needed it?

She did flora, too, more for fun as a hobby than part of her profession, but migratory birds were her scientific bread and butter. Thorensen loved the crisp early mornings to catch their most active chirps, and the long hours stalking their favorite haunts, counting, analyzing. Like a hunt, only nothing died in the end. The time allowed her to focus in a way the modern world couldn't, with its constant flashy distractions, mostly generated by too many _people_ , demanding a soul suck of attention and time.

St. Marks wasn't her only assigned territory, but its sheer size and biological diversity made it a natural ground zero. FWS agreed – it was one their crown jewels for North American migratory birds, one of the oldest conservation areas in the country, and a general point of contact between scientists, hikers, sports fishers and hunters, and the government. In the heart of a very conservative area, that was no mean feat.

And then the “chemical spill” happened around St. Marks-the-tourist-town, outside the Refuge proper but still supposedly affecting the entire Wakulla river estuary down past the lighthouse into the bay. FWS was suddenly out, and the military was in. The entire situation was such obvious bullshit, Anya was shocked nobody but the online conspiracy mongers called them on it. There was no industry in a village of a couple hundred people. There was no port and no tankers sailing through a wildlife preserve. The highway to the north wasn't even affected, so it wasn't a truck. Only a five mile radius around the lighthouse was affected, including a chunk of Flint Rock to the east and a zone of water in the bay blocked off by the Coast Guard.

If it really were some kind of spill, Anya expected her office to be among the first to be called in. Who knew better the impacts on wildlife than the folks who studied it all the time? But they were unceremoniously shut out. Do your research over on the west end, they were told; St. Mark's Lighthouse and Port Leon were closed. National emergency, they said. Barbed wire went up. Patrol towers went up. The locals muttered about how even their back accesses in boats were cut off, but those living near the exclusion zone were paid off with suspicious efficiency. The paper in Tallahassee ran some hand wringing stories, and a few brief notices went out nationally. _St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge – Temporarily_ _c_ _losed_ _to assess risk to the public_ _._ It never reopened.

Anya began to pay attention to the rumor mill back in the office, for once. Normally she didn't give a shit about government politics, but this time access to her birds were on the line. Not to mention, if there really was some toxin out there, what was going to happen when winter hit and all those northern flocks came down to feed and nest?

“This is a widespread ecological disaster waiting to happen,” she complained to her boss, Carla Mayer. Carla used to be a field surveyor, before settling on middling GS-12 administrative duties. “I mean, we've already spotted a few blue-winged teals up at station nine. If this is some kind of DDT situation, the animals are going to spread it out of the Refuge.”

Carla didn't have the usual look of annoyed exasperation at her ranting. In fact, she seemed terrified. “Let it go, Anya. Let the guns take care of it, and don't go poking your nose in it. There's nothing you can do.”

Anya's eyes narrowed as the _fat chance_ flickered across her mind. Carla wasn't high up enough to justify being debriefed, but she'd obviously heard something nevertheless. Something scary enough to kowtow to the military, instead of defending her bureaucratic territory like the middle-management pit-bull she was.

Whatever it was, “chemical spill” was a coverup. Anya vowed to figure it out, ideally without getting shot or fired in the process.

She started with the folks easiest to access: her colleagues, to get an idea of what was escaping the lines at the Refuge. For whatever reason, people liked her, despite – or perhaps because of – her bitchy disposition, fuck-you haircut, and general misanthropy. It turned out Anya wasn't alone in her outraged curiosity, and some of the other researchers were collecting clues and rumors too.

One consistent feature gleaned from evacuated eyewitnesses was that of a “meteor” sighting the morning before all hell broke loose. Anya wondered whether it was really a meteor – perhaps, instead, an experimental plane or spy satellite had come crashing to the Earth. Heck, maybe it was even the proverbial weather balloon, but with some unapproved protocol. Anya could imagine the military's interest in such circumstances, but she didn't get why the crash of a DOD capital-S Something would take so long to recover, or require such an extensive evacuation, extending miles in a radius around the lighthouse. They were weeks into the quarantine now. Surely that was enough time to dig whatever had gone boom out of the ground.

And then, in a creepy turn of events, the marine folks began to notice the mutations.

The army could fence in the bigger animals, but they could hardly control the birds or the fish, not without some magical dome over the whole area. Lifeforms swam or flew or dug themselves out of the quarantine zone. Out in the Apalachee bay, and of course the connected Gulf and Atlantic ocean, the restricted area was just an imaginary line on a map. A lot of the smaller creatures didn't migrate far from home, but hundreds of species would, over time. The anomalies weren't obvious at first, for it could be hard to tell where critters originated, given that aquatic tracking was primitive and reserved for the most endangered species like whales. They usually had to make do with sampling, and then a statistical picture was built up.

So at first it was just raw numbers, and a gut feeling on the part of the researchers that something was off. Too many sea turtles were showing up abnormal limbs; too many snappers blinded or with odd growths emerging from their scales. Many of the anomalies weren't even factors they normally kept track of, since they were so rare. One of Anya friends on the turtle beat just started putting a _WTF??_ column on her catch sheets.

Of course, when some local fishermen pulled a monster billfish out of the water with octopus tentacles instead of fins, it raised more eyebrows. That one even made the local news, for exactly one television airing before the feds – the _other_ feds, the ones with tanks – shut it down.

Over on Anya's turf, it didn't take long for some avian weirdness to show up too. Predatory birds who occupied a huge range showed up with abnormalities first – odd growths, wrong feathers, aberrant limb development. She noticed an uptick in numbers right about September, a couple of months after the quarantine zone had been established. Like the birds knew the area was dangerous, and were getting the hell out if they could. Anya blew her budget on GPS tags for some of the ospreys and hawks, both the freaks and the apparently normal. The normal birds avoided the zone, as if a giant black DO NOT ENTER sign were hung in birdese in the air. The abnormal ones tended to fly back and forth along the edges of the zone, as if trying to decide whether to plunge back in.

If they did re-enter, they disappeared off data collection altogether in a weird bubble right around the lighthouse. As if the signals were snuffed out instantly, or muffled by some invisible barrier. Or the bigwigs were controlling the satellites, and really, really did not want anyone to see, not even on the level of some lowly bird mapping.

Occasionally birds turned up dead, so she had samples of the growths sent in for analysis. The results were genetic gibberish. The lab had a hard time even identifying markers that would work, like the tumors had completely mutated off-species. Pathology was baffled too. It looked kind of like a teratoma, they told her. Those weird ovarian cysts that grow hair and teeth. As if the cells regressed back to undifferentiated stem cells again, and then could transform themselves into any kind of tissue.

“I just found a whooping crane flopping on the ground because it grew gills,” Anya snapped back over the phone. “Tell me how the fuck that's possible. How can you grow random tissue if you don't have the DNA for it in the first place?”

There was no coherent answer.

Radiation was discussed, and Anya and a few other brave folks surreptitiously hiked as close to the quarantine as they were allowed with some university-borrowed Geiger counters. Anya somehow wasn't surprised when nothing showed up, not a blip out of the ordinary. It didn't fit the pattern of a Chernobyl-esque event. In that case most of the effects on wildlife were either congenital, or accumulated over a long lifetime for an increase in cancer rates. It didn't produce crazy transformations in the space of weeks. Genetics just didn't work like that, Anya believed.

Second choice on the speculation front was some kind of horrible lab-created virus, one that swapped chunks of DNA around and/or fiddled with gene activation. If that one were true, humanity itself could be well and truly fucked, but Anya had her doubts. There was no sign of contagion outside the zone. She'd been keeping an eye on the common homebody birds – your chickadees, your warblers – and none of them showed signs of anomalies, even if they were nearby a discovered migratory animal. Only those creatures that had likely emerged from the zone showed signs of problems. Whatever it was, it wasn't catching in the greater area.

Then one day, the lab called and told her all the samples had been confiscated.

“By _who?”_ demanded Anya. “Can we order a FISA on our own goddamned research?” But it was unclear. National security, they'd said, and waved a piece of paper at the lab techs. No one wanted to get in trouble, especially since they weren't running things on the QT.

Carla called her back into her office. Anya was fuming.

“My _job,”_ snapped Anya as she walked in the door, “is to monitor bird migrations through the Refuge. And migratory birds through the Refuge are the ones dropping from mutations. Who the hell is interferring with my clearly stated mission parameters?”

Carla's face was set like a stone. “I told you to drop it, Dr. Thorensen.”

“Look, Carla, I haven't gone _near_ the border with no man's land. I've totally been a good girl. Everything we've dug up has been outside the zone.”

“Cut the crap,” Carla said. “You and I both know this bad mojo is coming form inside the zone. Do you want this thing to spread? Do you want to cause a panic, if word gets out?”

“Maybe people should panic a little. Maybe there'd be actual answers then, instead of a cover-up.”

“Let them handle it, Thorensen. I've been told the situation is being monitored and is under control.”

“How are they handling it?” Anya demanded. “We're the experts. We know the area and the animals and the plants and the water more than anyone, and no one's asked us for our input. All they do is tell us to stop looking, and steal what little we've found. Who are these experts that have it under control?”

“I don't know,” Carla said darkly. “But I'll pass your… enthusiasm for St. Marks...along. If you want to get in so bad, maybe they'll let your aggressive smartass in.”

It would be two years before that offer came true.

  


* * * *

  


In the time that followed, the quarantine zone got bigger, the data black hole bigger inside it, and the birds more gnarly by the season. By year two the entire pattern of migratory birds had changed, as far as Anya could tell. They no longer entered the Zone, despite the favorable habitat that (presumably) still awaited them there. But sea creatures and birds continued to emerge occasionally, trapped there or born there, and they all showed signs of unstable genetics. Anya gave up trying to get others to analyze her samples, but still collected them, and sometimes popped them under her primitive microscope at home to try and make sense of it. But she was no pathologist, and it still looked like an impossible mishmash of cross-phylla – sometimes cross- _kingdom_ – tissues.

And then one day, two badly-cut suits showed up at her office door.

“We understand you're an expert on the St. Mark's NWR,” one of the suits said, without introducing herself. “We also understand you've been, ah, collating anomalies in the area.”

“Kind of hard to avoid the escaped mutants,” Anya said. “Which agency did you say you were with again?”

One of the chicks showed her teeth. “There's been a new development inside the quarantine zone. We could use some technical advisers who are familiar with the … intact habitat. The risk level has now decreased so that civilian contractors may be brought on board. Assuming you can pass the security clearance,” she added, side-eying Anya's half shave.

 _Intact habitat._ Anya was dying to know what the _unintact_ habitat looked like. So instead of snapping back, she forced herself to pleasantly nod. “Not a problem. You suits are finally letting us open dykes have clearances now, yes?” When the lady squirmed enough, she added, “Will I get briefed on the situation after passing security? After two years, I kinda want to know what the big bad is.”

“The particulars of previous missions will probably remained classified, as well as the ultimate nature of the anomaly. But as far as the wildlife effects, yes. That's what we need you for.”

“Good enough,” said Anya. “Lead the way, pencil necks.”

* * * * *

Another week later, she was standing in a full contamination suit in front of a large barbed wire fence. _The shimmer zone,_ one of the soldiers had called it. The shimmer had been the anomaly, or a side effect of the anomaly; it never was clear. Nevertheless she'd gotten the message: whatever lived within the shimmer had been subjected to extraordinary mutagenesis. How exactly Anya couldn't guess, and she guessed the suits didn't know either. It was hard not to suspect the shimmer was not of this Earth, although, true to their word, nothing was said of the anomaly's “origins.”

In any case, it was gone now. The soldiers were cagey on that topic, indicating that they probably knew more about the end of the shimmer than they were letting on. Still the bottom line for Anya was that mutagenesis was not ongoing; whatever had changed under the shimmer's influence was still changed, but nothing new was being altered. Her task was to assess the damage, evaluate risks to the surrounding biosphere, and make recommendations for containment. Part of Anya was impressed that “containment” was even on the table. She imagined that the generals would have preferred to nuke north Florida from the sky.

 

Anya was alone on this first venture into the zone. That took some arguing, although she suspected that nobody really cared all that much. The area was crawling with military patrols and teams of experts combing through the zone, cataloging the mutants. One surly ornithologist wasn't on anyone's radar. They sent her vehement warnings about killer crocs and rampaging bears and giant mosquitoes, oh my! Anya shrugged. She'd been working the bayous for ten years now, and catching mutants for two. And with all the guns around, the more vicious creatures had likely been laid to rest already.

None of that really prepared her for the shimmer zone.

She was used to the weird animals by now, so it was the _plants_ that shocked her at first. Amazing explosions of color and form dangled from every tree, shrub, blade of grass. Why would they all bloom so voraciously, she twondered. Most plants only flowered for a short period compared their main task, vegetative photosynthesis to keep the plant alive and growing. Organisms couldn't spend _all_ their time enthusiastically reproducing. Most of the time, you just had to eat. Whatever caused this, it wanted its creations to spread, to bust open from shiny embryos and ripe seeds.

She saw forests of blue and purple seaweed growing up from a lake. She saw giant butterfly chrysalises hanging like fruit off an ocher kudzu vine. She saw fungi blooms the size of a car, cracking open and birthing babies with the faces of tiny voles, and the tails of small snakes. She saw a turtle scrambled like a Picasso, radially symmetrical instead of bilateral, with a head peaking out of the center of its pearly shell, and eight legs extending from the body. She saw what might have once been her sweet little chickadees, a whole tribe of them each with a different coat of scales or fur, and hopping on what looked a human hand, opposable thumbs grasping branches as they tried to fly.

That first day , it was too much to take in. The genetic soup of an ecosystem, vitamixed. As if Dali were a mad god, and she was trapped in his playground. She radioed in to get the location of the nearest patrol campsite, which turned out to be on the edge of the abandoned tourist village also called St. Marks, that dumb little town for which the quarantine zone had been originally stablished. Anya wandered into it but didn't look around, instead crawling into the cocoon of her one-person tent on top of broken blacktop and dropping to sleep immediately.

In the morning, rain pattered on her tent. Anya awoken refreshed, and more balanced. She just needed to get her sea legs in this odd new place, and stop marvelling _fuck, that's impossible_ at every little thing. Obviously if she observed it, it wasn't impossible, merely unknown to her experience and imagination.

Anya lay there and watched the patterns stream down above her, and contemplated the place critically. How could anything be alive in here? The vast majority of mutations were deleterious; you couldn't just swap things around and expect bodies, flowers, or fungi spores to _work._ Anya was a solid believer in rational materialism; she never was one for mystical mumbo-jumbo about the sacred mysteries of life or soul energy or Gaia or whatever. But now she came face to face with organisms that seemed driven, externally or internally, to live. To survive, no matter how absurd or improbable. She thought of her gilled crane that somehow flew through the shimmer, only to die choking on air once removed from its influence.

Outside her tiny solo tent, she heard a pair of soldiers coming off patrol. “The hox garden, too fucking creepy,” she heard one of them say. “In a zoo of creepiness, that takes the cake.”

“They should bulldoze that to the ground,” the other one agreed. “Maybe the whole park. Fucking unnatural. Flatten it all and let God sort it out.”

 _What is natural?_ _What is nature?_ _t_ hought Anya. She poked her head out of her tent. “Hey dudes, what's a hox garden?”

“The heebie-jeebie area behind the general store,” one of them replied “Can't miss it.”

She curtly nodded and began to pack up her stuff.

* * * * *

  


The whole town – such as it was, barely more than a pit stop even in its heyday – could be described as heebie-jeebie. It looked like it had been abandoned for twenty years, so enthusiastic was the foliage takeover. Here one could see the genetic swaps even more clearly than in the swamp. Like Americans everywhere, the residents must have had yards filled with non-native landscape plants, because now mutants included remixes of climbing roses, lilacs, magnolias, hibiscus, fruit trees. The human structures seemed flimsy and sterile in comparison, as if the lush takeover emphasized the ephemeral nature of modern civilization. _You leave, we'll take over in a heartbeat,_ it seemed to say. Anya sometimes got a similar ghostly feeling from old shacks and other abandoned outposts found rotting in the humid outback of the South. Even under normal circumstances, trees had patience, while the roses and rabbits and chickadees rambled with abandon.

The hox garden, however, was a whole different level. When she saw the apiary, she began to laugh.

They were in the shape of human beings, so at first glance it looked like Edward Scissorhands had come along, or they were trapped in one of those fairy tales where enchanted people had been turned to stone. Only in this case, the base seemed to be azaleas, growing upright with bilateral symmetry, in the rough but perfectly proportioned form of adult human beings. She guessed why some smartass tagged them with the name hox, although the soldiers probably had no idea what they were saying. The _h_ _omeobox_ genes were among the oldest genes not only in the human genome, but found right on down to the genomes of plants, fungi, and single-cell organisms. These genes controlled morphology, or the body plan of an organism. Where does a limb go? Where does a leaf bud go? Why here and not there?

Plant-human hybrids. Mutant life finds a way, to paraphrase an old movie. Anya laughed even harder.

She wandered around, feeling curiously better than the day before. Maybe the absurdity of the place was getting to her. The area was clear and breezy, absent anyone but her, the human plant figures, and some bird calls. The songs, like the landscape, were not recognizable as any species in the area, but still beautiful. She followed the sound of one distinct individual, apparently not flying around, but lingering in a grove of live oaks. Anya guessed that the trees predated the extraordinary growth during the shimmer, for their huge forms were more or less normal, despite streamers of growth hanging off.

In the center of the grove there was a woman.

At first Anya thought it was another apiary-formed growth, but then her head turned and she smiled. The bottom half of the woman melded with the ground, upside-down branches growing into the earth like a golden-green banyan tree. From the chest down her skin merged with cracked bark and vines, spreading out, rooting itself and suckling off the nearby grove. Only her head and one arm were recognizably still human, the rich tan arm reaching out from a bare shoulder and covered with brightly colored lichens. Her hair curled down in cascades of messy refkecting tendrils, and some small critter nested along her back. Her deep brown eyes were unfocused, dreamy, but still the most human part of her.

Anya took a step back and stifled a yell.

“S'okay,” the woman slurred softly. Her voice whispered as a vibrato, as if she no longer had lungs with air flowing through them, but vocalized on some other kind of vibration alone. “it's not as terrible as it might seem.”

Resisting the urge to turn and run straight out of he shimmer zone, never to look back, Anya forced herself to approach the hybrid figure. “Who...who are you?” she stammered.

“Josie.” The “J” registered softly, more of a “dzh.” “What's your name?”

The bird that she'd been tracking fluttered down and landed in Josie's long curly spider-silk hair. It looked and sounded like four birds in one: sturdy hawk wings, long egret bill, coot-like water-borne feathers, and rooster plume on its rear. A child-God couldn't have put together a more ridiculous bird, but it seemed happy enough. It let out a throaty warble, stretching its capacity to vocalize.

“Anya, uh, Thorensen,” Anya said, distracted. “Bird person.”

“Ornithologist. Lovely. This one is silly, is it not? And yet so proud to be alive and singing.”

“Yeah,” said Anya softly. “Josie, how did you…?”

“Get here?” She paused and spaced out, those black eyes retreating into herself. “I cannot remember. I haven't spoken in so long. I thought I gave that up.”

Her speech was indeed getting stronger and clearer. Anya waited, letting her collect her thoughts from what had be a spectacularly scrambled brain. Then she ventured, “Did you go into the shimmer when it was still up? Because it looks like it mixed your human tissues with...”

“Oh. Yes. That's right. We went in. I did not come out. I was so tired, and sick. All I wanted was rest.”

“It looks like you've gotten all the rest you'll ever need,” Anya said wryly. “Listen, I'll call a team, we'll figure out some way of getting you out.” She was dubious, though, The poor thing would likely end up in a lab somewhere, examined for how she worked. But she was beautiful the way she was.

“No,” Josie said. “Please, just stay, and talk. I remember talking now. Like this bird finding its voice.”

“Do you even want to be saved?”

“Saved from what?” she said, as if she'd forgotten she'd even had another form.

Anya decided to go for broke. This conversation was officially a Picasso painting anyway. “You know you're a tree, right?”

“I did notice that, yes,” Josie said with another smile. Soft, like all her features. Anya bet she was a pretty femme in her previous life, A shy, smart, librarian type who never wore lipstick or high heels, and was ever more attractive for it. How did such a girl end up on a top secret mission, while an aggro like her wallowed between the trees looking up for birds?

“It's who I am,” Josie continued. “Human, hawk, oak, moss, mushroom. What's the difference? I was a physicist in a former life. I remember. All particles and energy. Everything the same underneath, that's what the shimmer wanted to tell us.”

“Was it...alive?” Anya asked.

“Oh yes. But alive is not the category you think it is. Observer influences the observed. I've had a lot of time to sit here and watch,” she added.

“Don't you want to be human again?” Anya whispered.

“No.”

She quieted then, and Anya decided to sit. She dropped her pack to one side, and lowered herself down to a patch of grass in front of Josie's lower form. The small blades waved of their volition, probing. More like whiskers than snakes. Everything was an analogy.

“I can feel you down there,” Josie murmured.

“Are you connected to this?” Anya asked. “Does it hurt when I sit on it?”

“It doesn't hurt. Nothing hurts,” Josie said. “I am just aware of it. The trees do talk to each other, you know. Through their roots. Even the wild-type ones.”

“Does wild-type even matter anymore?” Anya mused. “I used to think it did. Save the endangered native species. Bemoan the invasive ones, as if it wasn't evolution in action. You and all the stuff of the shimmer … are you invasive, Josie? Are you going to spread out like a virus?”

Josie looked amused. “Spread out? I can't even move.”

“Like a kudzu vine, then. Like dandelion seeds blowing across a continent. Even plants have their ways. We found mutie birds and fish well outside the shimmer, but I don't know if anyone's looking for mutie pollen.”

“Such a thing is impossible,” Josie said, and Anya swore she could hear a touch of amused sarcasm on her voice. But still gentle. “Without the shimmer, they cannot recombine.”

“ _You're_ impossible, Josie. In fact, I'm finding it weird that they never found you, even though you're just sitting there. I wasn't debriefed on what happened to the expeditions that went into the shimmer when it was still up, but I've heard rumors. They scoured the land searching for all human remains, or what was previously human. Why aren't you surrounded by a team of panicked surgeons, trying to figure out how to save you?”

“I do not need saving.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

Josie laughed, and the sound was like a musical rustling. Movement of something thin and papery on a gentle breeze. “Has anyone ever told you that you are pretty?”

“Oh my God no. People with half a brain realize I wouldn't appreciate it.”

“Beautiful, then. Definitely beautiful.”

“Sure, tree, try to pick me up.”

Josie laughed again. “Well, I do not have even half brain now.”

Anya ran her hand along the filaments. They were warm, and caressed her skin back. She hoped she wasn't crushing the ones she was sitting on. “What should I do here? Doesn't your family want to know where you are, what your fate is?”

“No family. They came into the shimmer with me. I don't think most came out.”

A vine slowly crept up around Josie's trunk. A kudzu vine, covered in flowers and colorful fungi blooms. It slithered rather than grew. The impossible bird swooped down and landed on the vine, right in front of Anya, so she could see how the impossible seamlessly operated as a possible whole. Something new under the sun. A whole lot of somethings.

“Humanity has a choice here,” Josie said. Her voice was still floating, more oracle than authoritarian. In a flash Anya pictured a cult worshiping this new goddess, waiting for the sacred words. She might be sitting among them. “Choose life, or choose death. Many here are contemplating death, to destroy what is unfamiliar and threatening. But maybe you can make them choose the unknown this time. Choose diversity. Choose something new, and see what happens.”

“Humans are shitty at wait and see,” Anya countered.

“You can learn.” She didn't count herself among the humans anymore. Anya didn't either.

Her hand resting on the damp ffilaments, Anya now could sense the forest on the edge of her mind. A presence, a buzzing “I'm alive!” Maybe Josie was feeding it to her; she didn't know. But closing her eyes, she could feel beyond the mutant zone, further out into St. Marks. The Refuge would live up to its name, she could see. The boundaries between old and new danced and flirted with each other, interacting, merging on the margins. Now what survived the disappearance of the shimmer would continue to survive, and become part of the Earth's ecosystem. They had no hope of containing it.

Anya peeled off her outer layers until she was down to a sports bra, and lay down with the mossy moving lifeforms under her back. The sun filtered down to her face, the same sun everything in St. Marks old and new had been born under. She closed her eyes, and relaxed, intending to let the forest take her.

The hawk-chicken hopped right on top of her gut.

“Birds fly; they do not need to tunnel in the ground,” Josie said above her. “Your task is other things. To join old and new.”

Anya twitched and smiled. She knew she was right.


End file.
